Jamie Shiao
“Tea is a conversation between friends, between family, between lovers. It is a drink served for rapport–a symbol to show companionship. It is a bond. It is an excuse to converse and to connect. It is the start of a relationship,” according to the store page for The Tea Shelf. This solo tabletop role-playing game by Kaden Ramstack (https://k-ramstack.itch.io/the-tea-shelf) is a cozy journaling experience that allows you to craft a narrative between two characters through the use of tarot cards.
The materials required were a deck of tarot cards and a journal. For the deck, I used the The Queer Tarot Deck by Ashley Molesso and Chess Needham. I separated the major arcana, the Ace of Swords, and the Ace of Cups from the rest of the deck and shuffled the resulting two decks. For the journal, I used Google Docs. The narrative you craft in this game focuses on two characters. I created two new characters specifically for this game, Rodrigo Rioja, a university student majoring in Prophecy, and Maceo Etienam, another student majoring in English. You can see my journaling progress here, although the game is not quite finished yet: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1J_HwNmtkYQ2XfFCLs9yu7O_ZSmWxKL9AIGrxwS-zLw0/edit?usp=sharing
To start the game, you arrange the major arcana + Ace of Swords in a 4×6 card grid, with the Ace of Cups in the bottom right (as shown below). You place your token on the Ace of Cups, which is your starting point, and then you start writing. You can decide if your characters are meeting for the first time or if they already have an established relationship, and I chose to have Rodrigo and Maceo meet for the first time. Then, every time you finish a chapter, you move your token to a new unflipped card and you flip it over. That card determines the tea your new journal chapter will be based around (specifically, the theme of the chapter is guided by the tasting notes for each tea). You then draw a new card from the minor arcana deck to give yourself a prompt based on the number and a setting based on the suit. So for example, my second journal entry was based on Rooibos Tea because I landed on The Lovers card, and it responded to the prompt of “Openness, Honesty. What do you say you regret?” because I drew a 5 of Pentacles.
When I played A Quiet Year with my group (Shayla and Joe), we understood the mechanics (except the Dissent Tokens. That truly made no sense) but didn’t end up enjoying the narrative we created. It felt shallow, like we did not have much to show for and no satisfaction from completing the story. In this game though, I quickly connected with the characters I had created and did my best to respond to each prompt. This game was as much of a role-playing experience as it was a writing exercise, and I actually enjoyed it a lot. The random chance and anxiety of drawing the Ace of Swords card, which ends the experience immediately, was always on my mind, but luckily I had gone through the character arc I had envisioned before I drew that card, and the game ended with a good ending. I had bonded so much with these characters that I drew some art to better visualize them and their interactions in my head~
While there was not necessarily a goal inherent to this game (the goal in my head was to make the two become lovers… uhh besides the point tho), there were plenty of opportunities for conflict based on the prompts. The prompts were open-ended enough that you could mold them into a continuity for your narrative, but they really helped shape the whole storyline too. I loved the uncertainty of where to move the token to try to avoid the Ace of Swords. Of course, I didn’t know where the Ace of Swords was, but I tried to be strategic about it anyway. I was also able to explore worldbuilding through the two characters’ interactions and their preceding setup. All in all, I liked this game a lot and definitely want to finish writing the narrative.
